


To Shoot the Moon

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Behind the Scenes, Blood, Episode: e046 Parade Day, M/M, Pre-Episode: e046 Parade Day, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:18:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7759294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today is Parade Day. If all goes well, StrexCorp will have no warning of the battle that’s coming, and the Night Vale resistance will succeed in doing the impossible.<br/>Night Vale's first attempt at revolution from Cecil's perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Shoot the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> The graphic violence warning is for Strex-type bloodiness. Also, this is a slightly more weaponized version of Night Vale (from the Night Vale NRA ads I'm guessing that there's a substantial population of gun owners).

The night before the parade, Cecil can’t sleep.  
Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, he gives up and gets dressed. He snags his rifle and the cleaning kit from the hall closet and sits on the porch with it laid across his knees. The spring night is warm and silent. He feels himself relax as he goes through the familiar motions. He’s had this gun for years; he can clean it by touch and moonlight.  
He startles when he feels a touch on his shoulder. Carlos, wrapped in a lab coat, walks around the porch swing to sit beside him. “Couldn’t sleep?”  
“I’m nervous about the parade,” Cecil confesses. He hasn’t told anyone this. He’s felt like he needs to be strong, as the co-commander of the revolution, as the Voice of Night Vale. “I just don’t know whether I can do it. Whether I’ll be enough…”  
“Hey,” says Carlos. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll do great. You have plenty of practice at subverting the Night Vale government, and this time you’ve got Tamika on your side.”  
Cecil glances around. “Don’t say that too loudly.”  
Carlos squeezes his shoulder. Thoughtful, Cecil starts cleaning the rifle again. The motions are familiar and mesmerizing. His hands are certain and steady when he raises it to check the sight.   
He aims at the low-hanging moon, and sighs, and lowers the gun. The sight is still a little off.  
When the sun rises, a little late this time, Carlos gets up. “Coffee?”  
“Sounds great.” Cecil packs up the cleaning kit and slings the rifle over his shoulder. He comes back inside in time to intercept Carlos, who’s carrying two steaming mugs. “Thanks.” Cecil downs half the coffee in one gulp and blinks at the sudden heat. “Much better.”  
Carlos eyes him. “You really shouldn’t be cleaning guns when you haven’t had any coffee.”  
“Sensitive Carlos. I’ll be fine.” Cecil checks his watch. “It’s early, but I need to leave soon—do you want a ride?”  
“That’s okay. I don’t have to be at the House That Does Not Exist until ten.”  
“Be careful,” Cecil says, and Carlos laughs.  
“When am I not? Science is fascinating, and exciting, and very, very dangerous in Night Vale. You be careful too.”  
Cecil steals a kiss before grabbing a spare clip from the hall closet and running out the door.

Carlos’s words are ringing in Cecil’s ears as he bleeds on the front door of the station and walks in. You’ll do great. You have plenty of practice at subverting the Night Vale government, and this time you’ve got Tamika on your side… Cecil tries not to think that last too loudly, in case StrexCorp has synced their computers to the Secret Police thought sensors.  
He feels like everyone is looking at him too closely. Is his messenger bag too full? Should he have tried to bring less equipment? No, he’s going to need all of it. What about the gun? Is that overkill? Now he knows he’s getting really paranoid. Carrying weapons is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in Night Vale. You never know what might jump out at you from a darkened corner, or a lit corner, or any corner—though most of Night Vale’s horrors can’t be harmed with a gun.  
Nevertheless, it’s a relief when he gets into his office-slash-recording-studio and shuts the door behind him. Cecil drops his bag in the corner and leans the rifle against the wall within arm’s reach of his chair. Then he leans over to pull down the curtain that covers the window to the control room. (He reminds himself that he is absolutely within his rights to do this.)  
Finally certain that he’s alone, Cecil leans over his laptop, shielding it with his body from the camera in the far corner of his studio. He opens a document—password-protected and encrypted with sacrificial blood magic—that details the plan for Parade Day. It’s summarized at the top in one word: Revolution.  
Cecil skims the document and reviews his part in the plan. Then he deletes it, and for good measure erases it from his hard drive and history. He already smashed the USB Tamika gave it to him on. If everyone else has done their parts, StrexCorp will have no warning of the battle that’s coming, and they will succeed in doing the impossible.

A few minutes into the show, Cecil cuts to a sponsored ad and immediately jumps into action, counting down the seconds in his head. He has just two minutes to get this done. His producer Daniel has left Intern Oliver in charge of the soundboard, and Cecil meets the intern’s eyes with an expression of cold steel. Oliver immediately starts to sweat. Cecil maintains the death glare for several seconds, and then places a finger against his lips: Shh.   
1:50. 1:49. 1:48.  
Oliver nods frantically, and Cecil shoots him a grin before spinning his chair and grabbing his messenger bag from the corner. He spins back and empties the contents onto his desk: a mess of cords, a set of headphones, a recording mic. Cecil assembles them with lightning speed, slotting pieces together, connecting cords to jacks, and finally holds up his portable recording headset. (The one that, under the current management, he isn’t really supposed to have.)  
47\. 46. 45.  
Cecil yanks the cords of the station microphone out of the control panel and replaces them with the cord trailing off his new headset. He ducks under his desk to tear out the cable that connects the control panel to the equipment in the producer’s booth.  
32\. 31. 30.  
Cecil spins his chair to face the mixer and starts slamming switches, including flipping on the one that automatically broadcasts everything instead of redirecting through the control booth, adjusting it to the new mic and praying (but not to a Smiling God) for success.  
11\. 10. 9.  
He holds his breath as the lights on the mixer flicker… and then blink into life.  
Cecil allows himself a brief fist-pump of celebration as (6. 5. 4.) the last words of the sponsored ad fade out. He sits up straight and takes a deep breath before starting to speak again. Daniel comes back into the room and sits at the defunct soundboard. He flips a switch or two, apparently trying to adjust the sound. Cecil has to stifle a grin as he flicks a few more switches on the mixer, through which he’s now pirating this radio show, to mimic what the soundboard should’ve done.   
Daniel always checks the equipment at the beginning of the show, but apparently he hasn’t considered the possibility that Cecil might reroute the signal while broadcasting. (It’s an extraordinarily stupid move, even with as much experience as Cecil has— a lot can go unfixably wrong in two minutes, and there must always be something on the Night Vale airwaves.)  
Cecil holds out through the traffic report and a reassuring phone call from Carlos, and finally, until this point undetected, he begins to broadcast coverage of the revolution.  
The look on Daniel’s face makes Cecil’s day.  
Cecil cuts to the weather and crosses all his digits. He’d be out there fighting, but he knows he would be captured as soon as he left his studio, rifle or no. So he’s stuck here, hoping against hope that Tamika’s revolution will do the impossible, desperate for the victorious message: We have won.

The reports start to come in. Bystanders are flocking to the site of the parade—to the site of the revolution. And Tamika is—Tamika is losing, and Night Vale is standing by and watching.  
Cecil is speaking desperately, because that’s the one thing he knows he can do: keep broadcasting and hope for the best.   
He exhorts Night Vale to act, to fight, to do something, anything.   
And then the text pings on his phone: Tamika and army captured.   
Cecil feels a sense of resignation. Now that Tamika’s lost, he’s become a conspirator. And his barrier (constructed of large signs reading SECRET ROOM!!! and KEEP OUT!!!) wasn’t really that strong.  
He can only keep speaking. And so he does.  
Cecil begs the people of Night Vale to keep fighting, to carry the torch onward. He doesn’t say what he wants to: that he will soon be gone, that they will have to fight this war without a Voice and without a teenage rebel to guide them.   
He knows this monologue might well be his last, and he tries to put everything in it. Everything he’d say if he had more time…  
Behind him, the door swings open. Cecil spins in his chair with a fighter’s reflexes, sweeping his rifle to his shoulder, finger rising to the trigger—  
In a blur of motion, before he can aim and fire, one of the intruders leaps forward and jabs a knife against his throat. The blade stays there as he narrates: it’s Lauren Mallard and someone else, a man. Both are smiling terrible, vicious smiles. The woman’s skin is far cleaner than her gore-spattered clothing, but the man’s arms are red up to the elbows and blood trickles down his lips and throat. Cecil doesn’t think it’s his own. Who is that holding the knife? No, he knows. That’s the Desert Bluffs radio host. Kevin, they called him...   
Lauren says, soft enough that the mic won’t pick it up, “Gun down, Cecil. This pretty little trick is over.”  
Cecil keeps talking as he has been all this time, steady and smooth even as he lunged for the gun. He’s trying to buy himself some time as he lowers the rifle and slowly leans it against his desk; like any Night Vale citizen, he can recognize a hostage situation when he sees one. Can he still shoot, or even use the gun as a club? No, not with the knife on his throat like that. He’d never be fast enough, and the rifle’s too long for close quarters anyway.  
The blade presses a little harder into his skin, and Cecil decides it’s definitely time to wrap things up. He hurries through the closing lines, voice starting to quiver in fear that he can no longer hide. Lauren scowls; apparently he’s taking too long. She takes quick steps over to Cecil and yanks the headset off him. He cries out and tenses to leap at her—hostage situations he can take, but this is a step too far—but freezes in place as the knife just twitches on his throat, barely breaking the skin.  
Cecil’s still yelling for Lauren to stop, because they can’t make him stop talking, they can never stop the Voice from broadcasting, that’s the one thing he knows they will never make him do—when she slams her bare fist all the way through the control panel. It shatters from the force of the blow, knobs and buttons splintering, wires ripping apart. The lights go dark and the ON-AIR sign fades to dimness and Lauren growls, voice terrible, “Now, Cecil, what was that about a revolution?”


End file.
